Scintilla

One problem with journeys that are beyond today’s technologies is that we forget, in our zeal to get a payload to the target, how little we know about the regions we’ll pass through along the way. It’s amazing how little we know, for example, about the heliosphere around the Solar System, yet any probe pushing into interstellar space will have to cross from the region of space under the Sun’s influence into a zone where the interstellar medium flows around this ‘bubble,’ disturbing the solar wind and creating a secondary bubble, the heliosheath.

Daniel Cressey; cross-posted from The Great Beyond The ice sheet covering east Antarctica may have been melting since 2006, according to new research, contradicting previous suggestions that it has remained stable or even grown in mass. Using measurements for 2002 to 2009 from a twin pair of satellites, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, say east Antarctica is losing mass at about 58 gigatonnes a year. Most of the loss appears to be from coastal regions and to stem from increased ice loss post 2006. Previous studies have generally used satellites to measure elevation or movement of ice. The new study - published in Nature Geoscience - instead looks at the Earth’s gravity field and uses that to work out how much ice is there. It also suggests that 132 Gt of the total annual ice loss of 190 Gt per year is coming from the west.

How often do you make errors in the lab that ruin a good experiment? Rather than flaws in experimental design, I mean errors like forgetting to add a reagent, pipetting the wrong amount or following a protocol step wrongly. Especially early on in your career, errors like this can be a real drain on your productivity. As I talked about earlier, listening to music in the lab may or may not help you here, but here are 10 other ways in which you can reduce your error rate and get more results. 1. Use a checklist. I have always found that using checklists during experiments is a great way to focus the mind and stop me from forgetting to add something or doing things in the wrong order. But you don’t have to just believe me… a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the use of simple checklists during surgery cut deaths and complications by one third. So perhaps by adopting checklists you can reduce the attrition rate for your experiments.

Cannibalism is a controversial topic. It is routine for particular societies to accuse "barbarians", enemies, or evil mythological figures, of cannibalism. When it comes to the archaeological record some skeptics have claimed that like "sacred objects" too often human remains found in peculiar circumstances are ascribed to human sacrifice or cannibalism. In Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

The ice sheet covering east Antarctica may have been melting since 2006, according to new research, contradicting previous suggestions that it has remained stable or even grown in mass. Using measurements for 2002 to 2009 from a twin pair of satellites, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, say east Antarctica is losing mass at about 58 gigatonnes a year. Most of the loss appears to be from coastal regions and to stem from increased ice loss post 2006. Previous studies have generally used satellites to measure elevation or movement of ice. The new study - published in Nature Geoscience - instead looks at the Earth’s gravity field and uses that to work out how much ice is there. It also suggests that 132 Gt of the total annual ice loss of 190 Gt per year is coming from the west.

Flibanserin's makers promise help for 'hypoactive sexual desire disorder'. It suits drug companies to medicalise in this wayBefore everyone jumps on the hype bandwagon by calling flibanserin a drug recently announced as a solution to female sexual dysfunction "the female Viagra" … oops, it's too late. Last week, flibanserin was hyped as such across the media, the Guardian included.Let's be clear about this, flibanserin is not like Viagra, and female sexual dysfunction is not like erectile dysfunction. Flibanserin is a drug that was initially tested as an antidepressant. It didn't work but trial participants noticed its aphrodisiac properties.

The US has ordered 250 million doses of swine flu vaccine, mainly from foreign manufacturers. That's a large proportion of the world's productive capacity. A couple of the biggest vaccine makers, Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, have promised to make donations to WHO for use in the poorer countries and with some smaller donations that's maybe 160 million doses. Countries like the US that earlier had pledged 10% of their supply have yet to do so, and given the political problems of sending overseas vaccine when there's not enough for US citizens, well, good luck with that. So at best we're talking maybe 200 million doses for the poorer parts of the world (about a third of the globe). WHO estimates this might cover 2% of their population. Might. (For a good summary, see Martin Ensirenk's story in Science, 6 November 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5954, p. 782 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_782 [sub required], h/t Don S.).

Amid mounting evidence that sleep is key for your memory, researchers published a paper in the journal Science last week suggesting that playing specific sounds while a person sleeps—sounds connected to something that the person is trying to memorize—could help the memory sink in. The researchers taught people to move 50 pictures to their correct locations on a computer screen. Each picture was accompanied by a related sound — meow for a cat, whirring for a helicopter, for example [The New York Times]. Next the test subjects lay down for a nap, and while they slept the researchers played sounds relating to half the objects. When the subjects woke up, scientists tested them on how well they remembered where each object went. Participants didn’t know they’d been subjected to the sounds while they napped, but they fared better at placing the objects for which they heard sounds in their sleep than those they didn’t.

Nature's year-long celebration of Charles Darwin's life and achievements continues in the current (19 November) issue, marking the anniversary of the publication of On The Origin Of Species 150 years ago, with a special issue on biodiversity, focusing on the dire challenges to Earth's biodiversity — and finding some reason for hope. The Darwin-related content from this issue, plus further discussion on this week's free Nature Podcast, can all be accessed within the journal's Darwin 200 special, an extensive collection of news, research and analysis commemorating Darwin's life, his science and his legacy.